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The Erie Otters' OHL playoff hopes have faded away. The odds of erasing a 15-point deficit with 19 games left are miniscule at best.

Yet these players still have much to play for -- pride, their spots on the team and success individually and as a team in the future.

What they have done up to this stage of the season hasn't helped them win consistently.

So Sherry Bassin, Otters managing partner and general manager, has dipped into an endless group of friends and contacts in hockey to give his team what he hopes are the tools needed to succeed in moving forward.

Enter Joe Quinn, a respected hockey coach and instructor from Toronto and founder of Power Edge Pro, a training system he created over the past decade that uses small-area training to develop better skating, stickhandling and puck-moving skills in tight spaces and high traffic.

"A lot of the elite teams and elite players now are really taking to small-area training," said Quinn, 50, who has taught his system to teams in the CHL (Halifax and Saint John in QMJHL), NCAA (University of New Hampshire) and the United States National Team Development Program, and began teaching it to the Otters Wednesday morning at Erie Insurance Arena. "Over two-thirds of the game is in one zone now."

Also enter Gary Roberts, founder of the Gary Roberts High Performance Centre in Toronto and master trainer to top NHL players like James Neal (Pittsburgh), Jeff Skinner (Carolina) and Steven Stamkos (Tampa Bay).

As the Otters' new consultant for strength, conditioning and nutrition, Roberts will teach the training program and lifestyle choices that allowed him to overcome two career-threatening neck injuries and play 13 more seasons in a NHL career that spanned two decades and included a Stanley Cup championship with Calgary in 1989.

"The best players in the league and the best teams in the league are the teams that prepare the best," Roberts, 46, said after his first training session with the Otters Wednesday afternoon at Best Fitness, 2147 W. 12th St. "It's about preparation, and it's about making sacrifices away from the rink. You have to do everything right as an athlete and as a player to be good nowadays. It's a game of inches."

The Otters are 7-18 in games decided by two goals or fewer this season. Critical points that could have placed them in the middle of the standings, slipped out of their grasp.

"We haven't found a way to win," Bassin said. "Maybe that is a maturity thing."

Now it's time to take the next steps in that maturation process.

Those steps likely won't lead to a playoff spot this season. Although they still are mathematically alive, the Otters are too far behind surging Saginaw, and a schedule that features Midwest Division rivals Kitchener, Guelph, London and Owen Sound is too challenging, to have a realistic chance. But those steps will be the added foundation for a team Bassin says has to make the playoffs next season.

"It's only going to make us better for the rest of the year and for next year, too," forward Connor Crisp, 18, said of these new programs.

Connor McDavid felt right at home during both workouts. As an 11-year-old, he joined a group of 51 players at a private hockey school in Toronto to test out Quinn's new system. Now the Otters are endorsing Hockey Edge Pro, and investing in the necessary equipment, to incorporate the system into their practices.

"It's a great way to work on your skills and get a good workout in," said McDavid, who experienced four months of intense training in Roberts' elite training program for the first time this past offseason.

"He's a legend," said McDavid, who witnessed the workouts players like Stamkos follow under Roberts' tutelage. "Anything you can take off of him can help."

Bassin said he has the right players in place to be a contender in the coming years. The playoffs this season "would have been a nice steppingstone," he said. "But what we do know is we're pretty close."

He hopes these new training programs are two missing pieces to future success.

"When we say we want to get better, we've got to do all these things to make sure we do get better," Bassin said.